


we dance with monsters through the night

by napoleons



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, kids who grow up together and don't realise the other might actually have feelings, mako mori is a badass and takes shit from no-one, unrealised and unrequited loves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:34:30
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleons/pseuds/napoleons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When they are twelve years old, they grapple with small fists and clenched teeth. </i>
</p><p>  <i>When they are fifteen years old they are still fighting; most things are intractably different, but some remain the same. </i></p><p>  <i>By the time they are twenty-one and the entire PPDC has relocated to Hong Kong things between them are irretrievably different. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	we dance with monsters through the night

**Author's Note:**

> Beware, here there be typos~~
> 
> I'll get round to them at some point! Still terrible, still practicing. I'll get there one day!

When they are twelve years old, they grapple with small fists and clenched teeth. There is a span of time in which skinny Chuck Hansen has to look up at his spidery adversary, the one who had been taught how to wield a sword since she could walk. Still, she isn’t control incarnate yet, as one day she will be, she still slips and punches his jaw with a weak elbow and an open fist and he, the creature of instinct, takes his chance and kicks her feet right out from underneath her and by the time they are pulled apart, each of them still clawing for the other, their mouths are bleeding and he has the beginnings of a black eye. The girl has a mean hook on her.  

“What happened?” they are asked later, alone, by their respective fathers.

They both shrug their aching shoulders. There wasn’t much left that could hurt them now; kids always want to feel alive.

 

*

 

When they are fifteen years old they are still fighting; most things are intractably different, but some remain the same. She is wound tight as a spring, her shoulders taut and her knuckles white around the hanbō they fight with in the kwoon at night when nobody is around to see them. He is her opposite. He is loose and easy, and often on the floor. On these nights, he is composed and cool in a way that he is not elsewhere; she knocks him down and he grins, black and blue, and lets her pull him up so they can begin again.

During the day, she does not speak much and he is again her opposite; surrounded by bright-eyed cadets who he impresses because (although he does not know it yet) he will be piloting the first mark V jaeger within the next six months, and he exudes the kind confidence that people expect. 

When they are fighting in the kwoon they don’t talk that much, either; there isn’t much space for it there. 

They understand each other in a different way, and when, one night, she drops him to the floor when they are fighting hand to hand (these days she has to crank her head up to look him in the eye) and they are tangled together for a moment on the mats, her leg wrapped round his arm and he makes this indignant noise through his clenched teeth and she drops the pressure and they’re left sitting side to side with matching heaving chests and their arms brushing up together and something in his stomach drops; she must have felt it too because she gets up so quickly and her back is so straight that she must be uncomfortable, and stalks out of the kwoon.

She doesn’t forget to pick up her shoes.

Still, things don’t change; she comes back again the next day, though he’d half expected her not to.

 

*

 

By the time they are twenty-one and the entire PPDC has located to Hong Kong things between them are irretrievably different.

Max remembers her. (Chuck turns back towards Striker as if he has something to do, as if he hadn’t just been about to walk over to Stacker instead: for once he is glad of his dad telling him to _stay here._ )

She doesn’t look over at him. He can be sure of that, even if he doesn’t look at her, either. When he calls Max back there is bitterness in his tone that he had not expected to be there; still, she doesn’t look at him. She’s looking at—who is that? an engineer, or something—instead.

 

*

 

She still hasn’t looked at him, not even when he’d been standing right in front of her after her and Raleigh’s compatibility test in the kwoon (anyone with eyes could see they were drift compatible, and it leaves a sour taste on his tongue) and she’d stalked right past him, eyes on the floor and her shoulders a little too hunched; he recognises the body language and almost follows her.

Almost.

 

*

 

Instead, he forgets all about what might have been and focuses on what he knows; mouthing off to Stacker had worked in the past (though not in the way he had hoped, sixteen and too cocky to hold his tongue when it might have helped him) so he does the same thing now.

He gets thrown out of the marshal’s office for his efforts, and right into the lion’s jaws. She is there with her _co-pilot_ , staring at her feet. He is certain she must be fuming; there are enough similarities between them for him to know that much.

(He wants her to break his nose again, or at least to try.) 

“Stop, now!” acting the part of the egotistical jerk with daddy issues comes pretty easily because that is what he is, if you forget everything else, and it is the only thing that ever works, he thinks.

 _That’s right; hold back your little girlfriend_ (she is looking at him now, her eyes wide and furious) _one of you bitches needs a leash_ (it doesn’t come from where he expected, the fist that snaps his neck back, but he shouldn’t have been so careless.)

It is not Raleigh fighting him, not slapping his neck and flipping him over because he had sparred with this person before when they were not a six-foot sheet of muscle and he wonders exactly what the two of them had shared in the drift.

 

*

 

The next time they meet he is not expecting it at all, but then, she had always been something of an enigma to him. He’s working on Striker, welding with thick gloves that he peels off and throws to the side when he sees her striding towards him, arms swinging purposefully at her side. He pushes the mask up his head and smirks lopsidedly, makes to stand up, and as if they were eleven again, she grunts as she side-swipes his face with her foot; he grabs hold of it but not before it makes contact with his jaw and when he tumbles backwards he doesn’t let go.

“What were you doing?” in an effort to extract herself from him, her hands flutter over his shins, his knees, his thighs and he goes very still underneath her, until she grabs his lapels and pulls him towards her and something in him breaks and—

“I was making sure the two of you never make it off the ground! He couldn’t hold a fucking crocodile down in a fight and—”

“He beat you pretty good,” she is the one smirking now, looking pointedly at the cuts on his face, and in return he narrows his eyes and glares somewhere just beyond her head. 

He could say: _I was distracted._ He should say: _I’m sorry I left you alone, for Striker._ He says: “he threw you completely off-sync,” _I wouldn’t have_ hangs thick in the air between them and she twists away and jumps upright. He stays on the floor. She considers holding out a hand to help him up, and then thinks better of it.

“Don’t do it again,” and though she is deadly serious, straight-faced and dour, it is a request, and not an order.  (Chuck is very good at following orders.)

 

*

 

_Go on, Gipsy, kick his arse!_

He knows his arm is broken; he knows that for him, everything is over, and that he won’t die dropping a nuclear bomb a hundred miles below the ocean’s surface. He is a shattered, broken thing. He wonders, briefly, how much of him there is left to salvage. 


End file.
